Literary movements are slippery things. They tend to be about egos, politics and rhetoric as much as actual writing. So it's refreshing to revisit the story of one of the 20th century's least likely groupings – the Movement – and discover it was all about poems rather than people.

The Movement kicked off in October 1954 when a leading article in the Spectator (written anonymously by its literary editor, JD Scott) mischievously identified the first significant trend in postwar British literature as, simply, "the Movement". This was a group of young writers united by their "anti-phoney" tendencies, a phrase from JD Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye – and by their being "bored by the despair of the 40s, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility".

The canonical list of Movement members didn't emerge until 1956, when Robert Conquest edited the poetry collection New Lines and put into it the work of nine authors: Kingsley Amis, Conquest himself, Donald Davie, DJ Enright, Thom Gunn, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain. It was a remarkable volume, not least because of its blunt editorial declaration that these authors represented the "restoration of a sound and fruitful attitude to poetry, of the principle that poetry is written by and for the whole man". The authors would soon go their different ways. Yet the tone of rational attack they shared, together with an unsentimental dedication to describing the present, proved enduring.

The 17 essays Zachary Leader has compiled here are inevitably, and properly, weighted towards the two most notable authors on the list, Amis and Larkin. To see this pair as young men, rather than the crusty couple of literary folklore, is to rediscover something quietly radical in their work: a rebellion against all notions of what it means to be studiously "literary" that today can seem commonplace, but that was worked out from first principles with rigour and admirable decorum.

As several of the essays explore, the crux of this revolt was a simple question: what, now, was a legitimate subject for serious poetry if you wanted an audience to read and to enjoy it? The question was put another way by Donald Davie in his 1957 poem "Rejoinder to a Critic", which asks: "How dare we now be anything but numb?", a query often cited as proof that the Movement authors believed that only a modest, ironical style was fit for the postwar world. Yet Davie's sentiment draws its force from a yearning that is more than rhetorical, and that Larkin and Amis gave perhaps keenest voice of all to. Could literature still dare to sing out in public, even after two world wars? And, if you did still wish to celebrate love, nature, tradition, how could this be done without collapsing into pastiche or bathos? As James Fenton points out, the battle "against fakery" could itself become a paralysing process .

There are few authors who have more carefully or passionately tested the limits of what remains possible for serious, public literature than the nine gathered in New Lines. And Conquest – the last still living – sums up with appropriate concision in his concluding essay: "I am still proud of you, and of myself for presenting you at, I hope, your best."